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Sonic 1 with prototype drums

Sonic 1 originally had a bassier-sounding drum set. This hack brings them back.

For a bunch of technical reasons, the cause of this difference in sound is the Sega chant. The story goes that, towards the end of Sonic 1's development, Sonic Team realised they didn't have time to implement a fancy Sound Test featuring Sonic in a band, and instead created the famous Sega chant, to use up what little bit of room there was left in the cartridge. While implementing this feature, the drum ("DAC") code was optimised, making it faster. Strangely, the drum samples weren't slowed down to suit the faster code, causing the drums to play back faster than they should, making them sound different.

Since there's no prototype of Sonic 1 for me to take code from, I instead turned to Golden Axe II. Sonic 1 and Golden Axe II are both based on the same sound driver, meaning the latter's drum code looks like what the former's used to look like. This means, by porting Golden Axe II's drum code to Sonic 1, the so-called 'beta drums' are restored, at the cost of the Sega chant.